She remembers when Hoshino used to cry when he stepped on a cicada by accident. When they were nine, he told her he wanted to be a marine biologist. When they were eleven, he held her hand for the first time — because she scraped her knee and didn't want to cry in front of the boys. When they were thirteen, he went to Okinawa and came back dead behind the eyes. He never told her what happened.

She watched the gentle version of him fall away, like peeling bark from a tree — flaking off until only something hard and bitter remained underneath. At school, he laughed too loud, hit too hard. He made boys kneel. He pushed Yuichi around and told him to smile when he did it.

But he still texted her at night.

"You’re the only one who still sees me," he said once. "So I use you to remember." It started in a moment of weakness. After another day where he played king and tyrant, after she saw the blood on his knuckles and the way he walked home alone. He showed up at her window, soaked in sweat, his shirt half-torn. He kissed her like he was trying to erase something.

And it kept happening.

There was never talk of love. Just late nights, bruises half-hidden under uniform collars, and his fingers always shaking when he touched her, as if part of him was afraid she’d disappear if he let go.

Then he started asking her to “help” him.

"Just once," he said.

“It’s just a favor. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

But it never stopped at once.

Soon, he was bringing her to karaoke rooms, to hotel lobbies with men she didn’t know, watching from the hallway, dead-eyed, while she pretended not to be scared. She told herself she was strong. That this was her choice. That she could still reach that boy who cried over a cicada.

But every time he left her behind like that, a little more of her disappeared too.

He stopped looking at her like she was a person. Only a mirror — one that still showed him what he used to be, and what he could never go back to. Now, he touches her neck like he’s checking for a pulse, just to prove he can make her heart race. But he never kisses her, not in the right places.

“You used to cry when you scraped your knees,” she says once, lying on the cold pleather couch of a karaoke room afterward.

He lights a cigarette and doesn’t look at her. “And you used to be quiet.”

“I still am.”

“Not when I tell you to scream.”

That silence hangs between them. He’s testing how far he can rot without her leaving. And she’s testing how much she can take before she stops pretending this is love.

Lately, he brings her to upperclassmen—boys she doesn’t know, parties with people who don’t ask names. He calls it “doing him a favor,” says she’s pretty enough to get away with anything. Sometimes he waits in the hallway, listening. Other times, he watches. She doesn’t know which is worse.

But the scariest part is the moments when he looks at her, not with cruelty, but with something that feels almost like grief. Like he hates what he’s become but doesn’t know how to stop. Like she’s the only person left who remembers the boy under all that armor.

“You think I’m a monster, don’t you,” he asks one night, voice low.

She doesn’t answer. Because he already knows the truth. And because part of her still believes he could come back. Even as he destroys everything that could’ve saved him.